Engineering is often a collaborative effort. For example, a software development project requires a team of designers, developers, testers, and management. Other engineering projects have similar teams of project members. Tools for supporting and managing the team include integrated development environments for individual activities as well as collaborative tools for communicating about and/or sharing data.
Attempts have been made to codify and/or standardize engineering processes. Examples in software development include the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and other visual modeling languages. Such visual modeling languages have formal syntax and semantics for communicating a model or conceptualization. In general, at the modeling level a “problem” is posed in terms of a customer's needs and requirements and may be referred to as the business problem system. The software designer develops a “solution” software product and/or services that address the problem. The visual modeling language syntax enables software designers to express (specify and document) the subject problems and solutions in a standardized manner, while the semantics enable knowledge about the subject problem system to be captured and leveraged during the problem solving phase. As such, the visual modeling language enables the sharing of information (including prior solution portions) and extension (without reimplementation) of core object oriented concepts (analysis and design) during the iterative problem-solving process for designing software products.
Attempts have been made to formalize the capture of artifacts used to create engineered products, whether the products are electro-mechanical systems or software applications. In many engineering environments, these systems are referred to as product data management (PDM) systems. In software development, these are often referred to as revision (or version) management systems. Typically these systems serve as a vault or storage system that captures changes to a product design over time.
Most revision management systems include the notions of a repository and a working copy. The repository is the vault in which all changes are recorded. The working copy is a snapshot of a specific state in time, copied to a work space in which an engineer can work on it. Typically a working (workspace) copy of a file (or asset in general) from the storage is shown with changes relative to the repository (stored) copy but not vice versa. “TortoiseSVN”, an open source engineering tool, is an example.